THE UGLY (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

The Ugly, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 25, 2025

When the truth behind a mysterious death is revealed in The Ugly, writer/director Yeon Sang-ho's movie asks more questions than it answers. There's only one solution, after all, to the puzzle of the death of a woman who has been missing 40 years, but the ramifications of how and, more importantly, why she disappeared without anyone really giving her absence or possible death a second thought are far more significant.

Without saying too much about the specifics, the final scenes of Yeon's screenplay are reminiscent of some tale that Edgar Allan Poe might have penned (Instead, the filmmaker is adapting his own graphic novel, which seems a promising medium for this particular story). That's because, ultimately, the story is, not only about death (and a specific kind of it, at that), but also about a rationale for behavior that only makes sense within a mind that has been twisted by and becomes fixated upon a single irrational thought. To reveal the answer, of course, would be to be ruin what isn't much of a surprising mystery but, more vitally, is a strong section of storytelling.

The build-up to that sequence, however, isn't nearly as compelling. Indeed, Yeon's structuring of this plot as a straightforward mystery, complete with assorted interviews and unofficial interrogations and flashbacks that all put forth a string of possible suspects and motives, might actually get in the way of the dark heart of what's really happening here.

It all starts with the first of several interviews. This one is of a blind man named Lim Yeong-gyu (Kwon Hae-hyo), who has become famous in recent years for starting a thriving stamp-carving business that began with the man running a humble stand in the streets.

There is also the impressive feat that Yeong-guy, who was born without sight, is able to carve such beautiful lettering on small surfaces despite his disability. Su-jin (Han Ji-hyun), the producer of a TV documentary being shot about Yeong-gyu, asks her questions and makes her observations about her subject in a way that the carver finds to be quite demeaning, but if it helps the business and the continuation of it under his son Dong-hwan (Park Jeong-min), he's willing to put up with it.

In the middle of the interview, Dong-hwan receives a phone call. It's from some official, telling the man that the skeletal remains of his long-missing mother have been found, buried in the side of a mountain. Dong-hwan never knew his mother, who left him and his father, according to Yeong-gyu, when he was still a baby. Suddenly, Su-jin's questions become about the engraver's wife, and she decides to start her own investigation for her television program, bringing Dong-hwan along to help.

From there, the narrative goes back and forth between those interviews with people who knew the dead woman and flashbacks that show the unfortunate life of Dong-hwan's mother, named Young-hee (Shim Hyun-been), and her relationship with Yeong-gyu (Park also plays the younger version of that character). Everyone, including estranged family members who stopped thinking about their relative decades ago, has one thing to say about Young-hee: She was ugly.

In addition to teasing a mystery that isn't much of one (There are two suspects, really, and only one of them makes sense within the context of the bigger picture of the story) and how the back-and-forth structure is inherently shallow, there's a significant issue that arises as soon as Young-hee is introduced. The movie feels unnecessarily cruel toward her, and it's not just because the character is primarily defined by everyone's belief about her physical appearance. That's a lot of it, of course, but she is also regularly mocked, humiliated, and belittled by others and, in some instances, the way Yeon depicts her. It may be a significant part of the story, obviously, but Yeon almost follows suit by refusing to offer anything else about the character and, indeed, making a point of even obscuring her face through the entirety of those flashbacks.

That approach makes Young-hee a curiosity or, even without showing her, a spectacle of sorts, as opposed to a character of any kind. She is little more than a plot device—a woman whose whole existence, apart from one superficial part of her, is an enigma. The movie itself, basically, is as uncaring about who Young-hee is as everyone who speaks meanly of or ridicules her. The only exception, of course, is her son, but Dong-hwan spends so much time listening to other people talk about Young-hee that he might as well not be a character in this story, either.

Instead of an engaging mystery, the whole of the plot feels like a distraction from and delaying tactic toward getting at the truth here. That truth is simple and disturbing in the last scenes of The Ugly, which point at far more complicated ideas about people feeling the need to match or fit in with social norms and standards. There's a genuine mystery in that tale, but this movie barely scratches the surface of it.

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